Robotics startup OpenTrons has come up with a way it believes will make wet lab experiments faster and cheaper – automation. Most life science research is still done by hand. This can be a tedious process that OpenTrons hopes to diminish by using robotics and software to complete it. “Basically, if you’re a biologist you spend all of your time moving tiny amounts of liquid around from vial to vial by hand with a little micro-pipette or you have a $100,000 robot that does it for you. We’re a $3,000 robot,” OpenTrons co-founder Will Canine explained. These older, more expensive machines require engineers to run them on the backend, but Canine says OpenTrons is “democratizing the tools” that allow for sharing protocols. In other words, his $3,000 machine is controlled by your web browser and allows researchers to download protocols from the cloud to run experiments without the need for an engineer to create the code first.